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Unix Architecture
A Unix architecture is a computer operating system system architecture that embodies the Unix philosophy. It may adhere to standards such as the Single UNIX Specification (SUS) or similar POSIX IEEE standard. No single published standard describes all Unix architecture computer operating systems — this is in part a legacy of the Unix wars. Description There are many systems which are Unix-like in their architecture. Notable among these are the Linux distributions. The distinctions between Unix and Unix-like systems have been the subject of heated legal battles, and the holders of the UNIX brand, The Open Group, object to "Unix-like" and similar terms. For distinctions between SUS branded UNIX architectures and other similar architectures, see Unix-like. Kernel A Unix kernel — the core or key components of the operating system — consists of many kernel subsystems like process management, scheduling, file management, device management, network management, memory m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Unix
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley ( BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems ( SunOS/ Solaris), HP/ HPE ( HP-UX), and IBM ( AIX). The early versions of Unix—which are retrospectively referred to as " Research Unix"—ran on computers such as the PDP-11 and VAX; Unix was commonly used on minicomputers and mainframes from the 1970s onwards. It distinguished itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language (in 1973), which allows U ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Concurrency (computer Science)
Concurrency refers to the ability of a system to execute multiple tasks through simultaneous execution or time-sharing (context switching), sharing resources and managing interactions. Concurrency improves responsiveness, throughput, and scalability in modern computing, including: * Operating systems and embedded systems * Distributed systems, parallel computing, and high-performance computing * Database systems, web applications, and cloud computing Related concepts Concurrency is a broader concept that encompasses several related ideas, including: * Parallelism (simultaneous execution on multiple processing units). Parallelism executes tasks independently on multiple CPU cores. Concurrency allows for multiple ''threads of control'' at the program level, which can use parallelism or time-slicing to perform these tasks. Programs may exhibit parallelism only, concurrency only, both parallelism and concurrency, neither. * Multi-threading and multi-processing (shared ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Root Directory
In a Computing, computer file system, and primarily used in the Unix and Unix-like operating systems, the root directory is the first or top-most Directory (computing), directory in a hierarchy. It can be likened to the trunk of a Tree (data structure), tree, as the starting point where all branches originate from. The root file system is the file system contained on the same Disk Partition Recovery, disk partition on which the root directory is located; it is the filesystem on top of which all other file systems are Mount (computing), mounted as the system boots up. Unix-like systems Unix abstracts the nature of this tree hierarchy entirely and in Unix and Unix-like systems the root directory is denoted by the / (slash) sign. Though the root directory is conventionally referred to as /, the directory entry itself has no name its path is the "empty" part before the initial directory separator character (/). All file system entries, including mounted file systems are "branches" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hierarchical File System
In computing, a hierarchical file system is a file system that uses directories to organize files into a tree structure. In a hierarchical file system, ''directories'' contain information about both files and other directories, called ''subdirectories'' which, in turn, can point to other subdirectories, and so on. This is organized as a tree structure, or ''hierarchy'', generally portrayed with the root at the top. The ''root directory'' is the base of the hierarchy, and is usually stored at some fixed location on disk. A hierarchical file system contrasts with a '' flat file system'', where information about all files is stored in a single directory, and there are no subdirectories. Almost all file systems today are hierarchical. What is referred to as a file system is a specific instance of a hierarchical system. For example, NTFS, HPFS, and ext4, all implement a hierarchical system with different features for buffering, file allocation, and file recovery. Concepts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thread (computing)
In computer science, a thread of execution is the smallest sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed independently by a scheduler, which is typically a part of the operating system. In many cases, a thread is a component of a process. The multiple threads of a given process may be executed concurrently (via multithreading capabilities), sharing resources such as memory, while different processes do not share these resources. In particular, the threads of a process share its executable code and the values of its dynamically allocated variables and non- thread-local global variables at any given time. The implementation of threads and processes differs between operating systems. History Threads made an early appearance under the name of "tasks" in IBM's batch processing operating system, OS/360, in 1967. It provided users with three available configurations of the OS/360 control system, of which Multiprogramming with a Variable Number of Tasks (MVT) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Preemption (computing)
In computing, preemption is the act performed by an external scheduler — without assistance or cooperation from the task — of temporarily interrupting an executing task, with the intention of resuming it at a later time. This preemptive scheduler usually runs in the most privileged protection ring, meaning that interruption and then resumption are considered highly secure actions. Such changes to the currently executing task of a processor are known as context switching. User mode and kernel mode In any given system design, some operations performed by the system may not be preemptable. This usually applies to kernel functions and service interrupts which, if not permitted to run to completion, would tend to produce race conditions resulting in deadlock. Barring the scheduler from preempting tasks while they are processing kernel functions simplifies the kernel design at the expense of system responsiveness. The distinction between user mode and kernel mode, w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
File Descriptor
In Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems, a file descriptor (FD, less frequently fildes) is a process-unique identifier (handle) for a file or other input/output resource, such as a pipe or network socket. File descriptors typically have non-negative integer values, with negative values being reserved to indicate "no value" or error conditions. File descriptors are a part of the POSIX API. Each Unix process (except perhaps daemons) should have three standard POSIX file descriptors, corresponding to the three standard streams: Overview In the traditional implementation of Unix, file descriptors index into a per-process maintained by the kernel, that in turn indexes into a system-wide table of files opened by all processes, called the . This table records the ''mode'' with which the file (or other resource) has been opened: for reading, writing, appending, and possibly other modes. It also indexes into a third table called the inode table that describes the ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
System Call
In computing, a system call (syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system on which it is executed. This may include hardware-related services (for example, accessing a hard disk drive or accessing the device's camera), creation and execution of new processes, and communication with integral kernel services such as process scheduling. System calls provide an essential interface between a process and the operating system. In most systems, system calls can only be made from userspace processes, while in some systems, OS/360 and successors for example, privileged system code also issues system calls. For embedded systems, system calls typically do not change the privilege mode of the CPU. Privileges The architecture of most modern processors, with the exception of some embedded systems, involves a security model. For example, the '' rings'' model specifies multiple privilege levels under which software may be e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interrupt Handler
In computer systems programming, an interrupt handler, also known as an interrupt service routine (ISR), is a special block of code associated with a specific interrupt condition. Interrupt handlers are initiated by hardware interrupts, software interrupt instructions, or software exception handling, exceptions, and are used for implementing device drivers or transitions between protected modes of operation, such as system calls. The traditional form of interrupt handler is the hardware interrupt handler. Hardware interrupts arise from electrical conditions or low-level protocols implemented in digital logic, are usually dispatched via a hard-coded table of interrupt vectors, asynchronously to the normal execution stream (as interrupt masking levels permit), often using a separate stack, and automatically entering into a different execution context (privilege level) for the duration of the interrupt handler's execution. In general, hardware interrupts and their handlers are used ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virtual File System
A virtual file system (VFS) or virtual filesystem switch is an abstract layer on top of a more concrete file system. The purpose of a VFS is to allow client applications to access different types of concrete file systems in a uniform way. A VFS can, for example, be used to access local and network storage devices transparently without the client application noticing the difference. It can be used to bridge the differences in Windows, classic Mac OS/macOS and Unix filesystems, so that applications can access files on local file systems of those types without having to know what type of file system they are accessing. A VFS specifies an interface (or a "contract") between the kernel and a concrete file system. Therefore, it is easy to add support for new file system types to the kernel simply by fulfilling the contract. The terms of the contract might change incompatibly from release to release, which would require that concrete file system support be recompiled, and possibly m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Memory Paging
In computer operating systems, memory paging is a memory management scheme that allows the physical memory used by a program to be non-contiguous. This also helps avoid the problem of memory fragmentation and requiring compaction to reduce fragmentation. Paging is often combined with the related technique of allocating and freeing ''page frames'' and storing pages on and retrieving them from secondary storage in order to allow the aggregate size of the address spaces to exceed the physical memory of the system. For historical reasons, this technique is sometimes referred to as ''swapping''. When combined with virtual memory, it is known as ''paged virtual memory''. In this scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage in blocks of the same size (pages). Paging is an important part of virtual memory implementations in modern operating systems, using secondary storage to let programs exceed the size of available physical memory. Hardware support is nec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
